Listen to Nichole read her piece by clicking below:

“The best church conversations,” she messaged,

“happen in the halls—while the sermon’s going on.”

I smiled as this surfaced in a text thread with Sarah Guerrero (watch for her piece later this month).

She’s not wrong.

This isn’t to discount the “goings on” inside. Worship leaders, sermon sayers, AV players—your blood, sweat, and tears are a sacred offering. (Nicole T. Walters: You’re preaching this week. Forgive me!)

But, maybe, even you agree.

That’s where it happened for me, anyway: In a four-way foyer conversation that unveiled what was hiding in plain sight. There in the hallways, I met the Invisible Church.

My friend and I played hooky from the service, and sank into oversized couches planted right outside the sanctuary. You know them. The ones that cradle 20 years of dust, visitor cards scribbled over with stick bodies, and remnants of Sunday school crafts. So vast, are they, that you think twice before descending into their depths. But we risked it, just so we could sit in a solitary space.

The brick wall separating us from the inside was as much a metaphorical barrier as it was a literal one. Years ago, hard felt and heartfelt differences in Biblical interpretation caused collision and division in our congregation. There were casualties and loss. My friend still smarted from the whiplash of it all.  I could see it in her eyes.

Why do we turn away when our brother is bleeding?

Why do we build the wall and then call it freedom?

If we’re free
Tell me why
I can’t look in my brother’s eye?
-From the Broadway musical, Hadestown.

The couch coughed up another raisin. I brushed it aside as we chatted over the sermon’s hum. Before we knew it, another woman sunk in bedside us. My friends—and especially my husband—will testify that I’m seldom short on words. But this time was different.

A casual “How are you?” wouldn’t do.

Not for her.

Not for this woman who waited at her husband’s bedside for years. His disease took it’s time—but no prisoners. Even as she mourned his death, she struggled to embrace a new life that meant caring for her disabled son alone.

She deserved more than that.

More than

“Bless your heart.”

or

“I don’t know how you do it!”

or

“God must have a greater plan.”

We almost missed the other woman—paused at the sanctuary door, looking back at us as she grasped its bronze handle.

Almost.

“My marriage is hanging by a thread,” she answered to the “How’s it going?” we lobbed at her.

It fell like a ton of bricks in front of us—as if the foyer wall had instantly crumbled to the ground. Like Jericho only without the fanfare. So, we held her words and her gaze for a few moments. Then she tiptoed over the ruble and slipped silently back to her sanctuary seat.

We’d practically missed her. And the woman that came before. And each other. Card-carrying-members, all, of the Invisible Church.

***

 ^“Jesus turned and saw her. ‘Take heart, daughter,’ he said, ‘your faith has healed you.’ And the woman was healed at that moment.”

Matthew 9:22

***

“The God Who Sees”¹

She bled for over a decade. In desperation she reached out to Jesus. “If I only touch his cloak,” she thought, “I will be healed.”

She wasn’t wrong.

In an instant, He delivered her from it all. It’s not surprising that we linger on the beauty of this moment, on Jesus’ compassion, His healing power, and the woman’s bold, brash faith.

But let’s not brush by the beginning of this story:

“Jesus turned,” Matthew writes,

“and saw her.”

He saw her. Not just another face in the crowd pressing in on Him, but a broken, and beloved image-bearer of Himself.  It wasn’t the first time Jesus lifted His eyes to the seemingly unseen. It certainly wasn’t—and isn’t—the last.

Google it.

Here are just a few:

“Some men brought to him a paralyzed man, lying on a mat,” Mathew reports. “When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the man, ‘Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven.’” (Matthew 9:2)

Just a few verses later, Mathew adds his own life-changing encounter with his Lord: “As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. ‘Follow me,’ he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him.” (Matthew 9:9)

The other Gospels apply similar brushstrokes that paint a seeing Savior:

In Mark, Jesus saw the “sheep without a shepherd” and then fed the hungry crowds on the banks of Galilee’s sea. Then he feed more than 5,000 of them with 5 loaves and 2 fish. (Mark 6:34)

Luke tells us how Jesus saw a crippled woman in the temple; bent over and unable to straighten herself until He healed her on that Sabbath day. (Luke 13:10-13) Likewise, He saw the poor widow’s offering at the temple treasury—and turned giving on its head. (Luke 21:1-3)

The Apostle John, too, remembers the God who sees:

How Jesus saw the blind man who couldn’t see Him back until that day. (John 9:1-5)

How He saw Mary weeping for her dead brother, wept too, and then brought him back to life. (John 11:33-35)

How, hanging from the cross, Jesus saw his mother and arranged for her care. (John 19:25-27)

And the list goes on.

From roadsides, boat hulls, and a well to pool sides and temple courtyards, even as he hung on a cross— Jesus saw them: tax collectors, adulteresses, the disease-ridden, demon-possessed, vulnerable, hungry, and poor. Most lived on the fringes of society’s fabric. All were image-bearers of a King.

The King saw them, and they were never the same.

***

As the sermon ended, so did our hallway conversations.

We didn’t agree—my friend and I—when it all came down years ago. Like the brick wall that separated the foyer from the sanctuary, we stood on opposite sides of a disputed doctrine.

Walls—as Joshua and Rahab will tell you—don’t stand forever. Freedom often rises from their rubble, if we will only look.

Next to you, pew-side or couch-side, are members of the Invisible Church:

The man who sat beside his wife for twenty years, and suddenly sits alone.

The depressed college student who barely made it out of bed.

The couple who, after Covid, is running out of reasons to return.

The women who hears the music of a baby’s coos in the row behind her, and wonders if she will ever hear her own sing.

The autistic grade-schooler who winces when the praise chorus makes her ears ring.

Lord Jesus, will you lift the veil

so that we can see them, too?

Your Church in all of its glory.

And may we never be the same.

¹ Genesis 16:13

Header Image: Josh Applegate on Unsplash.

Background Music: Zakhar Valaha from Pixabay.

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Nichole Woo

Writer at The Narrows

Nichole Woo calls the Rockies home, where she writes at the confluence of belonging and a life that nudges her to the edges. She’s been the only girl on the team, the fumbling foreigner in the coffee shop, and the only mom she knows that coexists with an OCD diagnosis and a dirty kitchen. Nichole is the executive editor and podcast producer here at The Mudroom. If she's not playing on mountain edges, she's writing on her deck where her hair no longer looks like this. George Pig (Peppa) is her blorbo. Connect with Nichole at her website, The Narrows, or on the socials.

Latest posts by Nichole Woo (see all)

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